Freedom of speech and freedom to disagree in school and beyond

All over the United States, there are extraordinary debates about whether you can have a debate. People say there’s no debate going on, and they’re debating that. Some people who think of themselves as left-wing liberals or moderates feel like they’ve been outflanked by students they call “woke”, which means students who are very concerned about racism and racist oppression. Some people on the right think that universities have become centres of indoctrination and nobody can disagree. Recently, I did an interview with an education publication that asked: ‘Isn’t it true that academic freedom has declined precipitously in recent years because people are self-censoring – people are afraid to speak their minds?’

I teach a class in which we read James Baldwin, and we watch a film about James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro. In the text that we read with that film, James Baldwin – a great writer, an extraordinary intellectual – uses the N-word. We say that – “the N-word” – but he doesn’t use that phrase. He uses the word.

I said to my students, and we had debates about this: we’re not going to say the word in class, but I’m not going to censor James Baldwin. He writes the word; he says the word in the film. That’s fine. Many people today think it’s inappropriate, especially for a white guy like me, to say that word. I won’t say it, but I’m not censoring the great James Baldwin. I have Black students, white students, Asian students, Native American students; everybody seems fine with it.

We read a memoir about sexual assault. People find it extremely troubling, as they should, but they’re fine with it. Giving people warnings about what they’re about to study when those things are extraordinarily intense is fine. It’s a good thing to do.

In my film class, we watch a documentary about childhood sexual assault. I tell the students about this in advance, because in a class of that size there will be people in the room who have had some experience in their family with this issue and I want them to be prepared. I say, ‘If you can’t handle it, let me know.’ In 13 years of teaching, no one has ever opted out. Some people have said they might have to, but they don’t. The freedom to engage with difference is there, but sometimes you have to prepare people for that engagement. The freedom to disagree is there, although there are people who are afraid of disagreement.

Sometimes when people are afraid of disagreement they say: ‘I am being silenced.’ But I don’t think they’re being silenced; I think they’re just afraid to disagree. Disagreement can become very nasty, especially in our times of intense polarisation. Yet the freedom to disagree is so fundamental to education, because how else are you going to find out you’re wrong unless someone feels free to disagree with you?

We often say: ‘I want to feel free to disagree.’ But that’s not the issue. Instead, it should be: ‘I want people to feel free to disagree with me. If they don’t feel free to disagree with me, I’ll never learn that I’m wrong.’

That’s how we should phrase this problem, in order for us to discover the error of our own ways. If we’re going to find the capacity to discover the errors of our own ways, it’s going to be through other people pointing them out and disagreeing with us. So I don’t worry about self-censorship. I worry about other people censoring themselves because they don’t want to show me that I’m wrong.

The freedom to say whatever you want has never been that important at a university campus. What we want is the freedom to say things that are contenders for our attention, our sympathetic imagination and that may turn out to be true. There have always been limitations.

Freedom of expression is fundamental, but at times that expression can be simply a tool of intimidation or harassment. In such cases, people with authority, be they faculty or administrators, have to protect the continuation of the conversation by keeping some people from using the conversation to intimidate and harass others.

There will be fuzzy cases, and one should err on the side of more freedom. But there are some cases where it’s very clear that it’s harassment and intimidation. People with authority on university campuses, or in the press, should keep the action of intimidation and harassment from taking place, even if that action is also an expression.

In Europe there are many laws that curtail certain things from the public sphere because they are racist, or antisemitic or other forms of hate speech. This is fully appropriate. It’s not a slippery slope where if you ban some things, you can ban everything. We have to protect the ongoing conversation so that people can continue to find ways of disagreeing, of agreeing, of sharing ideas and of disputing ideas because they’re not subject to harassment and intimidation.

Sometimes there will be judgment calls, but there isn’t a formula for this. I don’t think you could say: we always let everyone say everything they want whenever they want. There are times in which, given the historical situation and the particular context, you have to protect people from intimidation and harassment in order to keep the conversation going and to have the full participation of people who have been marginalised or excluded.

How does the freedom to disagree intersect with debates on vital issues like vaccination or national security? The free speech absolutist says we just need more speech. But that’s like the market fundamentalist who says: ‘I don’t want any economic regulation. You can pollute the air or the soil, and we just won’t buy from the polluters.’

But we know that some pollution is irreversible, and we need some regulation of the market in order to protect the Earth and protect people so they can continue to engage in the market. Market regulation is not the end of the market. It’s just a way of protecting the market so that it continues to flourish.